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Deadspin Criticizes Bleacher Report for Being Like Deadspin [Update]

Most sports fan know that Bleacher Report is a site filled with mostly unintelligent content created in such a way that it garners the most page views possible. Almost every post is either a giant exaggeration or a list of some kind. And that’s fine. Sometimes it’s fun to click through a slideshow of “The 10 Most Overrated Socks in The NFL.” But Deadspin doesn’t think there’s anything good about BR, as evidenced by a post today.

Deadspin links to a SF Weekly piece about BR and picks out a bunch of sections to show just how terrible BR can be. Deadspin says that BR uses a team to analyze trends so that the site’s articles will attract hits, that BR’s headlines are purposely misleading and that the site is “every bad or degrading moment anyone’s ever had in journalism, all strung together and turned into machine-certified corporate policy.”

That is all sort of true! But, uh, isn’t this the pot calling the kettle black? After all, Deadspin is a site most famous for posting a picture of Brett Favre’s sausage, and we’re not talking about an Instagrammed brunch.

Deadspin’s post even admits that they take similar tactics to BR, so why even post the hit piece in the first place? It’s almost like Deadspin went overboard with its opinion just to attract readers. What an odd thing to do.

UPDATE:
Tommy Craggs, Deadspin’s editor-in-chief, just wrote me about this post. He proclaimed that my take was both “fucking stupid” and “fucking idiotic,” which I think means he loved it. The exchange between Craggs and I is below.

You don’t see a qualitative difference between a site that’s expressly forbidden from breaking news and a site that goes to great, occasional unethical lengths to do so? You really think we’re in the same business?

That’s fucking stupid.

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Tommy Craggs
Editor, Deadspin

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Hi Tommy, thanks for the note. Yes, I do think you two are somewhat similar. Otherwise I wouldn’t have written that.